Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features Texas blues singer and guitarist Mance Lipscomb. Enjoy!
Mance Lipscomb - Jack of Diamonds
"There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel."
-- Vladimir Lenin
News and Opinion
Turkey’s Political Influence Felt as Washington Turns Its Back on Kurds Fighting ISIS
Some of the most successful fighters against the Islamic State are being isolated and attacked by America’s new favorite ally in the region.
Kurdish militias are achieving the stated goals of the Obama administration — to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS — as well or better than any other fighting force. From Kobane to the recent liberation of Tel Abyad, Kurdish militias have won hard-fought victories against ISIS fighters in Syria, while preventing the advance of ISIS into northern Iraq.
What’s more, the Kurds in northern Syria have established a political order like few others in this region of the world. Known as Rojava, the Kurdish-controlled areas of Syria are governed through participatory decision-making forums that include councils made up of women, Christians, Yazidis and Muslims. David Graeber, a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, calls Rojava a “remarkable democratic experiment.”
This past week, the Turkish government made two critical air bases available to U.S. forces, a long-sought concession that allows the U.S. military to launch anti-ISIS raids more quickly. ... Simultaneously with its announcement about U.S. access to the air bases, the Turkish government broke its truce with Kurdish militants. During the past week, the Turkish military began attacking Kurdish bases in Iraq and allegedly in Syria as well. ...
Rather than condemn the attacks on the Kurds, the Obama administration praised Turkey’s government for making its air base available.
A New War is Unfolding on Turkey's Eastern Border
DESVARIEUX: But some would argue, Patrick, that it may be a bit of a stretch because Erdogan has not openly said that he's going after any pro-independence Kurdish groups, just the PKK, which is labeled a terrorist organization by the United States. What do you make of that argument?
COCKBURN: Yeah. But I think--I think it's actually the PKK isn't even his main target. It's the parliamentary party, the Kurdish parliamentary party or Kurdish-dominated party called the HDP. Now, the history of this is only in June, last month, this party got 13 percent of the vote. It got about 6 million votes. And this deprived Erdogan, the president of Turkey, of his parliamentary majority. And they're desperate to get that back in a second election. So they kind of need to knock this Kurdish party out of the election by either pretending they're terrorists, actually, they've been calling for peace, or alternatively just putting their leadership in jail, stopping them functioning.
So I think that's probably one of the primary purposes of this whole new war is not the PKK, which the Turks probably know they can't really put out of business with air attacks, but the Kurdish political party, which is much more specific, which took away Erdogan's parliamentary majority.
DESVARIEUX: So do you see Erdogan's decision to join this fight against ISIS as being purely political, then?
COCKBURN: Yes, I think it's very largely political and it's motivated by internal Turkish politics.
Turkey sends in jets as Syria’s agony spills over every border
Turkish air strikes in Syria last week signalled a new phase in a conflict that has left its bloody mark on every country in the region. But will the Turks now agree to US demands to cease all clandestine dealings with Islamic State?
When US special forces raided the compound of an Islamic State leader in eastern Syria in May, they made sure not to tell the neighbours.
The target of that raid, the first of its kind since US jets returned to the skies over Iraq last August, was an Isis official responsible for oil smuggling, named Abu Sayyaf. He was almost unheard of outside the upper echelons of the terror group, but he was well known to Turkey. From mid-2013, the Tunisian fighter had been responsible for smuggling oil from Syria’s eastern fields, which the group had by then commandeered. Black market oil quickly became the main driver of Isis revenues – and Turkish buyers were its main clients. ...
In the wake of the raid that killed Abu Sayyaf, suspicions of an undeclared alliance have hardened. One senior western official familiar with the intelligence gathered at the slain leader’s compound said that direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking Isis members was now “undeniable”.
“There are hundreds of flash drives and documents that were seized there,” the official told the Observer. “They are being analysed at the moment, but the links are already so clear that they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship between us and Ankara.” ...
The oil-smuggling operation run by Abu Sayyaf has been cut drastically, although tankers carrying crude drawn from makeshift refineries still make it to the border. One Isis member says the organisation remains a long way from establishing a self-sustaining economy across the area of Syria and Iraq it controls. “They need the Turks. I know of a lot of cooperation and it scares me,” he said. “I don’t see how Turkey can attack the organisation too hard. There are shared interests.”
Turkey's Conflict with Kurdish Guerrillas in Iraq Can Benefit Isis in Syria
In reality, the PKK may not be the most important target for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who last month lost his majority when the largely Kurdish HDP party won six million votes and 13 per cent of the votes. If the HDP can be discredited, or its share of the vote falls below 10 per cent in an election called later this year, then Mr Erdogan will once again have the majority he wants.
In Britain this used to be called “a khaki election” after the notorious general election in 1900 during the Boer War when the Conservatives beat the patriotic drum and demonised the Liberals as unpatriotic and pro-Boer.
Mr Erdogan may be intending a similar electoral campaign later in the year when his AKP party might sweep back to power on a nationalist wave. The HDP would be demonised as PKK collaborators, despite their record as advocates of a long-lasting peace agreement. ...
One dog that has not barked so far is Isis itself. It has not claimed the suicide bombing at Suruc that killed 32 young Turks on their way to bring aid to the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani. Isis has also not responded to its positions being bombed by the Turkish air force. Earlier in the week, an Isis spokesman said the first Turkish air strikes had hit only abandoned headquarters buildings.
It may be that Isis calculates that the Turkish government’s actions are primarily directed against the Kurds and the jihadis are only being hit to create a public relations smokescreen. This does not mean that Isis is right, but a Turkish government assault on the PKK, whose Syrian branch, the PYD, is Isis’s most effective military opponent, might be in the interests of the self-declared caliphate.
The claim by US officials that the use of Turkish air bases will be a “game changer” in the war against Isis is wishful thinking. The problem for the US is that it is entirely dependent on the success of its air campaign. It dare not commit ground troops.
Obama Assures Dems He’ll Remain Hostile to ‘Odious’ Iran
Speaking to a number of Congressional Democrats today, President Obama sought to sell the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran on the idea that the US will remain hostile toward Iran irrespective of the deal, and that it simply means Iran won’t have nuclear arms during that hostility.
Obama is said to have told the Congressmen that Iran remains “odious” in his eyes, and “we’re still going to fight them at a lot of different levels.” Several of them expressed outrage, however, that Obama is still backing the nuclear deal despite opposition from Congressional leaders.
Private firms at heart of US drone warfare
Corporate staff are reviewing top-secret data and helping uniformed colleagues decide whether people under surveillance are enemies or civilians
The overstretched US military has hired hundreds of private-sector contractors to the heart of its drone operations to analyse top-secret video feeds and help track suspected terrorist leaders, an investigation has found.
Contracts unearthed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal a secretive industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, placing a corporate workforce alongside uniformed personnel analysing intelligence from areas of interest.
While it has long been known that US defence firms supply billions of dollars’ worth of equipment for drone operations, the role of the private sector in supplying analysts for combing through intelligence material has remained almost entirely unknown until now.
Approximately one in 10 people involved in the effort to process data captured by drones and spy planes are non-military. And as the rise of Islamic State prompts what one commander termed “insatiable” demand for aerial surveillance, the Pentagon is considering further expanding its use of contractors, an air force official said.
The contractors review live footage gathered by drones and spy planes flying over areas of interest, and help uniformed colleagues decide whether people they spot are potential enemies or civilians.
Though private contractors do not formally make life-and-death choices – only military personnel operate armed drones and take final targeting decisions – there is concern that they could creep in to this function without more robust oversight.
Even now, contractors are aware that any errors of analysis they make could lead to the wrong people getting killed. “A misidentification of an enemy combatant with a weapon and a female carrying a broom can have dire consequences,” one told the bureau.
Scamming ISIS: Chechen Muslim girls fleece terror org with flirty photos
Women Screw Islamic State out of Thousands of Dollars by Posing as Potential Brides
Three young Chechen women are in trouble after being caught scamming Islamic State (IS) fighters out of thousands of dollars by posing as wannabe jihadi brides, according to reports in Russia.
The women are reportedly now being held by Russian authorities on charges of suspected fraud.
Russian website Life News reported that the scam began on social networks, where the women would begin to contact IS militants in Syria and Iraq. If the targeted jihadi "bought" their ruse, the girl would send him pictures.
One of those involved, Maryam, told the website that one man in particular began communicating with her at first. "He began to lure me, saying: 'Do you want to come to Syria, [it is] very good.' I told him that I had no money," she said. So the man wired her 10,000 rubles ($168).
After Maryam received the money, she deleted her social media accounts, setting up new ones and finding a new set of new men to speak to. Between the three women, they received more than $3,100, before Chechen police caught them. ...
Maryam risks a fine or up to six years in prison if convicted of fraud.
Israel’s 2014 Gaza bombardment deemed war crime, Amnesty says
On Aug. 1, 2014, after a temporary cease-fire was announced in the war between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli officer, Lt. Hadar Goldin, went missing after a firefight with Hamas gunmen in the town of Rafah.
Suspecting that he had been seized, Israeli troops launched a fierce onslaught, heavily bombarding and shelling parts of Rafah in an attempt to pin down the suspected kidnappers.
The intensive attack, following the “Hannibal Directive,” under which Israeli forces can respond to the capture of a soldier with overwhelming firepower, left at least 135 Palestinian civilians dead, including 75 children, according to Amnesty International, one of the deadliest episodes of the 50-day campaign.
In a report issued Wednesday that used digital technology and satellite images along with witness testimonies to piece together the sequence of events, the human rights group said Israeli forces committed war crimes during three days of attacks that continued even after Goldin was declared to have been killed in action.
Guantánamo detainee says his 'comfort items' were taken to force interrogations
A Guantánamo Bay detainee who recently published a bestselling memoir is alleging that US authorities at the detention facility have confiscated most of his legal mail and family correspondence to pressure him into submitting to further interrogations.
In a declassified letter written to his attorney on 17 April, Mohamedou Ould Slahi cryptically referred to Guantánamo officials offering to help him retrieve his “so-called comfort items” if he would allow the resumption of interrogations that a judge ordered to end approximately six years ago. ...
In 2009, as part of Slahi’s habeas case challenging his detention in federal court, Judge James Robertson ruled that the government can no longer interrogate Slahi, a prohibition that has held for five years. Slahi had previously been subject to sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures, stress positions, death threats and rape threats to his mother.
The Joint Task Force at Guantánamo has yet to proffer an explanation for cutting off substantial amounts of Slahi’s ability to communicate with counsel and even review his letters with his family, attorney Nancy Hollander told the Guardian. ...
The US Justice Department is due to file an explanation on Wednesday in federal court before Judge Royce Lamberth. ...
In April 2010, Robertson ruled in Slahi’s original habeas case that the Obama administration could not continue to detain him merely out of concern Slahi could associate with terrorist groups post-release. A government appeal has kept Slahi at Guantánamo for the intervening five years.
Varoufakis Sued for Alleged Treason While Syriza's Left Platform is Accused of Conspiracy
Greece crisis escalates as IMF witholds support for a new bail-out deal
Talks over an €86bn bail-out for Greece have been thrown into turmoil after just four days as the International Monetary Fund said it would have no involvement in the country until it receives explicit assurances over debt sustainability.
An IMF official said the fund would withhold financial support unless it has guarantees Greece can carry out a "comprehensive" set of reforms and will be the beneficiary of debt relief from its European creditors. ...
The delay could last well into next year, forcing the other two-thirds of the Troika - the European Central Bank and European Commission - to bear the full costs of keeping Greece afloat. ...
The IMF's position now jeopardises the tentative basis for a new three-year package thrashed out by lenders over a tortuous weekend of talks in mid-July.
Drachma revolt adds unease to Greece's awkward alliance
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' power-sharing acrobatics look harder to perform by the day. ...
Tsipras will be battling to keep control of Syriza at a meeting of the party's 200-member executive, facing dissenters who argue the Left has abandoned its principles over the past six months under the country's popular prime minister. ...
In a vote three weeks ago, Tsipras effectively lost his majority in parliament, when nearly one-fourth of SYRIZA’s lawmakers refused to back new austerity measures. Pro-European Union opposition parties were left to save the bill.
Since then, far-left dissenters have grown more defiant.
Panagiotis Lafazanis, recently fired as energy minister in a reshuffle, called on the government and country to prepare for a national currency.
“An exit from the euro ... in spite of all the dark propaganda, would in no way be a disaster,” he told cheering supporters packed into an Athens theater this week.
Barter booms in cash-strapped rural Greece for the first time since Nazi occupation
A rising number of Greeks in rural areas are resorting to swapping goods and services as they struggle to keep businesses going under tight government capital controls, according to reports.
But even those facilitating the barter economy fear that it harks back to the Nazi occupation.
Christos Stamatis started the website Mermix three months ago to link farmers wanting to share heavy machinery in exchange for cash or other goods. "A barter economy is something that we shouldn't aspire to and should be a thing of the past – the last time we had it on a large scale was when we were under occupation," he told Reuters, referring to the Nazi occupation of Greece in the Second World War.
It is difficult to quantify the scale of the barter economy growing in rural Greece, but online forums and anecdotal evidence suggest that it is surging.
One barter website started three years ago said the number of users and the volume of transactions have doubled since the banks closed in June.
After Greece, everyone will want a Plan B to leave the euro
With the revelations of the secret plans for a parallel currency drawn up by officials at the Greek Finance Ministry at the height of this year’s crisis, we now have what is in effect a reversible euro. ...
Leaked transcripts have revealed that Varoufakis was working on a proposal for a parallel currency, and discussed it in depth with a group of hedge funds. ... The Germans were working on something similar. At the height of the crisis, the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble put forward his own Plan B for Greece. It involved a “temporary” suspension of its membership in the euro, along with plenty of humanitarian aid to help it through the first few difficult months of re-establishing its own currency.
As it happens, both plans were perfectly sensible. The only real difference was that one involved the Greeks breaking out of the chains of euro membership, and the other involved them being released — both end up with the prisoner being free again, but the process of getting there is very different. But whether they were sensible or not is not the real point. What is important is simply that the plans exist — and once they have been made they are impossible to ever take off the table.
Congress' fix for high-profile hacks is yet another way to grab your private data
The government can’t keep its own data safe, but Congress wants companies to give it even more of your private information.
In the wake of a series of widely-publicized hacks, including the recent compromise of government personnel records, the US Senate rushed to take up a bill that supporters say will protect the typical supporters from the sophisticated hacks of the future. It appears Republican leaders have stepped back from that plan, but rest assured, just as night follows day, supporters are planning to bring this bill back to the Senate floor this year.
Dozens of cybersecurity experts have said that this bill – known as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or Cisa – will do very little to stop high-profile hacks like the government personnel records breach. What it will do is make it a lot easier for private corporations to give your information – everything from medical records, shopping history, even GPS tracking data – over to the government, even when there is no need to do so. ...
Instead of being required to filter out private information unrelated to cybersecurity, corporations would be permitted to hand the government large volumes of their customers’ data, with only a cursory review.
The bill would also create a bizarre double-standard: the government would be prohibited from using this information to police the companies that provided it, but would be free to use it to investigate you for matters unrelated to cybersecurity. The corporations’ privacy rights would matter more than your privacy rights. ...
Private companies already share a lot of information about cybersecurity threats. And it makes sense to encourage this. But any “information sharing” bill that lacks adequate protections for Americans’ privacy rights is not a cybersecurity bill – it’s a surveillance bill by another name.
John Oliver: Mandatory Minimums
University police officer charged with murder for shooting of Samuel DuBose
A white police officer who gunned down an unarmed black man in Cincinnati, Ohio, has been indicted for murder by a grand jury, as the county prosecutor described the shooting as the “most asinine act” he had ever seen committed by a police officer.
Samuel DuBose, 43, was killed on 19 July by a single shot to the head fired by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing during a routine traffic stop, in which DuBose was pulled over for not having a front license plate.
Tensing had maintained he was “dragged” by Dubose’s vehicle after the two entered into a physical altercation and was forced to shoot, but Hamilton County prosecutor Joseph Deters said body-camera evidence completely contradicted this account.
In a frank assessment of the officer’s conduct, Deters said Tensing had “purposely killed” DuBose and that he “should never have been a police officer”.
Samuel DuBose video appears to show two officers reinforced false account of police killing
Police officers in Cincinnati appear to have corroborated a false account of the fatal shooting of Samuel DuBose in the immediate aftermath of the incident, a detailed analysis of body-camera video released on Wednesday shows.
DuBose, an unarmed 43-year-old black man, was shot dead by white University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing on 19 July. The officer claimed he was “dragged” by DuBose’s vehicle following an altercation during a routine traffic stop, and was therefore forced to open fire, shooting DuBose once in the head.
On Wednesday, Tensing was indicted for murder after Hamilton County prosecutor Joseph Deters said body-camera footage, which he released at a press conference announcing the charge, showed the officer was not dragged during the encounter. ...
A Guardian analysis of the nearly 28 minutes’ worth of Tensing’s body-camera footage released by the prosecutor’s office also shows the aftermath of the shooting and reveals that on three occasions, two other police officers repeat Tensing’s account that he was dragged by DuBose, and one of these officers claims to have witnessed it occurring.
Judge sets $1 million bond for Ohio officer charged in murder
A judge on Thursday set a bond of $1 million for a former University of Cincinnati campus police officer charged with the murder of an unarmed black man he had stopped for a missing license plate.
Ray Tensing, 25, pleaded not guilty at the arraignment before Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas Judge Megan Shanahan in Cincinnati.
Wall Street’s Secret Dividend from the Fed May Go to Fixing Potholes
Back on November 4, 2012 and again on July 25, 2013, we blew the whistle on an obscene, secret entitlement program between the Fed and the too-big-to-fail banks: a century old program where every year, boom or bust, despite the overall level of interest rates in the markets, the Fed pays out a risk-free, guaranteed 6 percent dividend to its member banks. (All Fed member banks get the dividend but the lion’s share goes to the biggest Wall Street banks because their capital dwarfs all other banks.)
Now, after more than a hundred years, there’s a plan in Congress to shrink that payout to 1.5 percent and fix our crumbling roads with the savings. Only banks with $1 billion or more in assets would be affected.
The Federal Reserve mandates that its member banks subscribe to “stock” in an amount equal to 6 percent of their capital and surplus. The banks have to post half that amount with the Fed upon becoming a member; the other half is subject to being called upon. The deposited capital translates into a corresponding share of “stock” in one of the 12 regional Fed banks. (The biggest Wall Street banks, of course, prefer holding their shares in their crony New York Fed.) The “stock” then pays out the 6 percent dividend to shareholders, meaning the banks.
If the bank had a hand in crashing the economy twice in the past century, say in 1929 and again in 2008 – like JPMorgan and Citigroup – it gets an extra bonus: its 6 percent dividend is tax-exempt. That’s because the statutes saythat if the bank’s shares in the Fed were acquired prior to March 28, 1942 the bank doesn’t have to pay corporate taxes on it. JPMorgan’s roots reach into the eighteenth century while Citibank, part of Citigroup, traces its founding to the City Bank of New York in 1812. CEOs of both banks were shamed before Congress in the 1930s for their role in the crash of ’29 and again following the 2008 Wall Street crash.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature WE NEVER FORGET: The Martyrs of the Bayonne Standard Oil Strike of 1915
Tune in at 2pm!
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Group Seeks to Expose Cozy Ties Between US Trade Rep and Wall Street
Americans deserve to know what Froman has been privately saying to these big banks.'
Citing his cozy ties to Wall Street banks, a group dedicated to exposing corruption and corporate influence in Washington, D.C. has submitted an official Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all correspondence between U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and the 10 largest U.S. financial institutions.
The FOIA request demands access to or copies of emails and other written communications between Froman, the country's top trade negotiator, and banks including JP Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup.
Froman is a former senior executive at Citigroup and received a "golden parachute" worth more than $4 million upon leaving the large financial institution to go into government.
Rootstrikers, the grassroots organization behind the FOIA request, has said that because corporate giveaways like the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) pose a threat to robust financial regulation in general—and the U.S. financial reforms implemented after the financial crisis in specific—"Americans deserve to know what Froman has been privately saying to these big banks."
Former GOP Sen. Phil Gramm: “It Was an Outrage” That “Exploited” AT&T CEO Got Only $75 Million at Retirement
Phil Gramm, a former three-term Republican senator from Texas who once ran the Senate Banking Committee, told the House Financial Services Committee yesterday that “it was an outrage” that his friend Edward Whitacre, the CEO of AT&T, only got “$75 million” when he retired in 2007.
“If there’s ever been an exploited worker” it was Whitacre, said Gramm, testifying on the fifth anniversary of passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Gramm appeared genuinely aggrieved by Whitacre’s shabby treatment and literally pounded the table while speaking. ...
Gramm attributed public anger at CEOs like Whitacre to “the one form of bigotry that is still allowed in America,” which is “bigotry against the successful.”
Berning down the house: Sanders throws massive house party for 100,000 supporters
Bernie Sanders spoke to more than 100,000 supporters across the country Wednesday night during simultaneously broadcasted house parties in support of the Democratic presidential candidate in all 50 states,the New York Times reports.
According to the Sanders campaign, more than 100,000 people had RSVPed to participate in more than 3,500 parties in houses, living rooms and coffee shops across the nation.
“Tonight is a historical night and all of us are making history,” Sanders said from D.C. “Why are we seeing spontaneous uprisings if you like and meetings in cities and town all over this country? My answer is the American people are saying loudly and clearly, enough is enough.”
The Sanders house party is he largest campaign event of the election season thus far. But the Independent senator knows he’ll need an army of volunteers on the ground to beat Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, and the viewers at the various house parties were asked to volunteer and join a chain of text messages.
“I mean at the end of the day, they will have more money to put more TV ads than we will, that’s true. But if we can assemble and get a hundred, hundreds of thousands of people out on the street, you know what? We will win,” Sanders said enthusiastically.
The Evening Greens
As Clinton Dodges on KXL, Sanders Voices 'Vigorous' Opposition
While leading candidate finds "wiggle room" to avoid answering tough question, her more progressive rival takes advantage
Hillary Clinton says she'll take a firm position for or against the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, but only after it's already been decided by the current administration or after she's elected president in 2016. ...
The question posed to her was simple enough. "As president, would you sign a bill—yes or no, please—in favor of allowing the Keystone XL pipeline," asked Bruce Blodgett, the local resident identified as the questioner.
"If it’s undecided when I become president, I will answer your question," Clinton answered. "This is President Obama's decision. I'm not going to second-guess him." ...
For his part, Sanders said in the wake of her comments that he finds it hard to "understand how one can be concerned about climate change but not vigorously oppose the Keystone pipeline."
As the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza pointed out, "This is pure politics by Clinton. It's a gamble based on the idea that the disgust over her failure to answer a direct question will be far less damaging than the fallout if she did offer her opinion. She might well be right, politically speaking. But that doesn't make it the right thing to do."
Shell Drilling Vessel Heading Right Towards Bridge Blockade
More than twenty-four hours after 13 climate justice activists with Greenpeace USA first went over the rails of the St. Johns Bridge in Portland, Oregon in order to prevent Shell's effort to begin an offshore drilling operation in the Alaskan Arctic, the blockade continued on Thursday as the support for the group spread around the globe.
So far, the target of the direct action, Shell Oil's icebreaker the MSV Fennica, has been prevented from leaving port, but there were indications just as this story went to print that the vessel had left a dry dock where it had remained throughout Wednesday.
Update (9:50 AM EDT): Shell's Fennica is on the move and the Greenpeace activists are being told by police and Coast Guard officials that they are violating local laws and a federal injunction by impeding the vessel's attempt to leave port
Dentist killer of Cecil the lion writes to his patients to apologise
A Minnesota dentist at the centre of international storm over the illegal killing of a beloved Zimbabwean lion has written to his patients to apologise, as crowds gathered around his suburban practice calling for him to face charges. ...
In the letter to his patients at River Bluff Dental, reported by WCCO radio, the dentist said he was sorry for killing the famous beast, but described hunting as his passion.
“I don’t often talk about hunting with my patients because it can be a divisive and emotionally charged topic,” he wrote. “I understand and respect that not everyone shares the same views on hunting.” ...
“The media interest in this matter – along with a substantial number of comments and calls from people who are angered by this situation and by the practice of hunting in general – has disrupted our business and our ability to see our patients,” he wrote, adding that he would work with patients to have them referred to other practices.
Palmer, 55, has not been charged with any offence, although Zimbabwean officials have said they would like to question him. The US Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating whether any US laws were violated in the lion’s killing and would assist Zimbabwean officials, a spokeswoman told Reuters. ...
About 200 people protested on Wednesday outside Palmer’s suburban Minneapolis dental office, calling for him to be extradited to Zimbabwe to face charges.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Report for DHS Warns That Booting Extremists Off Twitter Might Upset Them
A tour of abandoned New Orleans, 10 years after Katrina - in pictures
The most polluted US national parks
Our monumental Turkey blunder: Who put the American exceptionalists back in charge?
The Kurdish Elephant and the Great Middle East War
The 1 percent declares war on Puerto Rico: The austerity push that unmasks neoliberalism
The Rorschach Candidacy of Hillary Clinton
KosAbility: Sunday We Celebrate Sig Lines.
Huckabee displays his transphobia
Obama practices the fine art of betraying the Kurds yet again
A Little Night Music
Mance Lipscomb - Take Me Back + Goin' Down Slow
Mance Lipscomb - Ella Speed
Mance Lipscomb - Blues in the Bottle
Mance Lipscomb - Out and Down
Mance Lipscomb - Long Tall Girl Got Stuck On Me
Mance Lipscomb - Ain´t It Hard
Mance Lipscomb - Oh, Baby! (You Don't Have To Go)
Mance Lipscomb - Can I Do Something
Mance Lipscomb - Big Boss Man
Mance Lipscomb - Captain, Captain
Mance Lipscomb - Sugar Babe
Mance Lipscomb - Charley James
Mance Lipscomb - Baby Please Don't Go
Mance Lipscomb - 1972 Harvard Dining Hall